Ford Motor Company Collapsing
by Jeff Davis
That rumbling sound you hear is Henry Ford turning over in his grave.
Yahoo News reports that “Ford Motor Company…capped the worst year in its 103-year history with a deeper-than-expected fourth quarter loss and said it would cut its production for the current quarter and lose market share through September. The No. 2 U.S. automaker posted a fourth-quarter net loss of almost $5.8 billion, or $3.05 per share, on declining sales of its profitable trucks and charges for employee buyouts. That compared to a loss of $74 million, or 4 cents per share, a year ago.”
Yahoo goes on to say:” The company posted a record loss of $12.7 billion for 2006, leaping past Ford’s previous record net loss of $7.39 in 1992. Ford shares slipped initially in pre-market trade and then recovered to be unchanged from Wednesday’s close of $8.20 on the New York Stock Exchange.” This dismal performance is AFTER closing 16 plants and laying off 45,000 jobs in North America.
What in heaven’s name is wrong? Well, to begin with, the American market is flooded with foreign-made automobiles since the last vestiges of trade and tariff protection went by the board many years ago, thanks to our lovely corrupt Congress and capitalist establishment and all those friendly lobbyists with their smiling Asian faces and briefcases full of cash. Secondly, any last remaining vestige of “buy American” patriotic sentiment in the people of this country also vanished long ago. A Korean Hyundai or a Japanese Toyota is sufficiently cheaper (and a better car) than almost any American model to overcome any lingering doubts about buying an expensive (and often poorly running and buggy) Ford or Chevy.
For a few examples of the positively brain-dead design departments in American car companies consider the following: In 1979, Chevrolet put an anemic three-speed automatic transmission from their four cylinder Chevette into their eight cylinder Camaro. The proud owners of these Camaros found themselves rebuilding their transmissions almost as often as other car owners bought new tires. A few years later, Chevrolet put a poorly-built electronic control module (ECM) into their prestige sports car, the Corvette. Corvette owners found their muscle cars dying on the freeway while the dealers swapped out the old faulty ECMs with no guarantee that the new ones would be anymore reliable. Other car companies like Ford were feverishly replacing metal parts with plastic sometimes causing brand new vehicles to suffer frustrating failures. Very little effort was made to ensure commonality of parts. A Ford Taurus from 1990 could have any one of three different electronic control modules.
During this period of decline, “lemon laws” were passed in many states forcing dealers to buy back any new cars that had to be fixed for the same problem three times within 90 days or if a new car spent 30 or more days in the shop during its first year. The fact that these lemon laws were deemed necessary is a sad statement about declining quality.
There are other deeper causes for the gradual extinction of the American-made automobile. American companies of all kinds are top-heavy with management, especially manufacturing companies. These companies should be hiring white working class Americans and giving them extensive on the job technical training. Instead they are hiring people with no industry experience with their “all purpose” business degrees and putting them in cubicles when they should be going down on the production line and learning to handle a wrench and turning lug nuts. Oddly enough, the Toyota and Nissan plants in Tennessee, downstate Illinois and other places in this country are doing fine. That’s because the American auto manufacturer’s twenty-three levels of management between the president of the company and the line worker on the floor is stripped down to four levels under the Japanese system.
Auto manufacturing jobs are among the last “good” blue-collar jobs in this country paying a living wage whereby a white working class man can support a family, although they are by no means as good as they once were. They are being shipped overseas at an alarming rate. The greedy corporations are doing anything they can to lower the labor costs in the auto plants that do remain here in the United States. That includes flooding their production lines with illegal Mexicans who will work cheap. Remember: the bulk of America’s problems are caused by capitalism and capitalism’s endless, insatiable thirst for CHEAP LABOR. (The social costs of twenty million illegals are dumped on the heads of us taxpayers.)
The result is a shoddy car that costs way too much and drives American buyers away in droves. Even those who would like to buy American, don’t want the nightmare of getting stuck with an over-priced lemon. America is cutting its own throat–again.